Last elephant in town faces heartbreak

May 21, 2009

When she came to live at Brookfield Zoo in 1984, Christy was 4 years old and a 1,000-pound waif who had been living in a suburban garage with another juvenile elephant.

From the moment she walked into the zoo's pachyderm house, she found a loving stepmother in Affie, one of the zoo's adult females. Extremely social and family-centered like the rest of their species, the two elephants became nearly inseparable buddies for 25 years.

Tragically, that relationship was severed last week when Affie died, leaving Christy as the only remaining elephant in a Chicago zoo and her keepers anxious to find her a new pal as fast as possible.

Christy (right) tries to get a piece of pumpkin away from Affie in October 2008. (File handout photo / Brookfield Zoo)

Within hours, zoo officials had taken steps to bring another elephant to Brookfield in the next few months. The move was in keeping with their plan to expand the educational exposure to elephants despite concerns raised in recent years about the limited habitat at zoos for the world's largest land mammal.

For the time being, Christy gets a lot of extra attention from zoo staffers. She is also out of view and indoors in the zoo pachyderm house, giving her a few quiet days to recover from the death of Affie, 39.

"She is working through it, she is doing OK," said Kim Smith, the zoo's vice president of animal care.

Christy could be back on display next week if the zoo completes its renovation of an outdoor elephant yard. Since the fall, the area has nearly doubled in size and will have amenities such as a mud wallow, sand mounds to climb, and soft sand and clay substrate to walk on.

The zoo's records show Christy was born in the wild in South Africa in 1980 and captured in 1982, but not by whom. Christy and a 2,200-pound juvenile male elephant somehow ended up with an unidentified private owner in the west suburbs. The owner, according to zoo records, asked Brookfield to take the two because he "decided he could no longer house [them] in his garage."

Keepers picked them up Dec. 7, 1984, and the male was soon transferred. As the keeper escorted Christy to the pachyderm house, Smith said, an emotional bond between Christy and Affie formed "the moment they saw each other."